” He is crazy. He’s a cowboy. The victims who marched to testify at the bar of the Chartres court did not have strong enough words to express their dismay. All claim to have been shocked by the experience they have had.
“When you are a police officer, you are 24 hours a day, seven days a week”, pleads the defendant, at the bar of the court of Chartres.
The man, aged 33, is a peacekeeper, assigned to a Parisian police station. He lives in Eure-et-Loir. “I have three hours of daily commute, there and back,” he explains.
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Is it fatigue, an excess of zeal, or the manifestation of a post-traumatic syndrome that would have pushed him to attack, according to their testimony, motorists on the way home from work? The mystery remains unsolved.
Between September 2018 and the following June, driving his Citroën C3, he stopped motorists. He is on trial for seven alleged acts of endangering the lives of others.
Hallucinating scenes described by the victims
The complaint of a motorist on June 19, 2019, is the starting point of the case. “I was at the entrance to Auneau”, explained the man to the gendarmes. “I passed a car. He caught up with me, passed me and pointed a gun at me and said, “Stop it, it’s the police.” He lectured me and fined me for speeding. “
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The investigators went back to the Parisian police officer. By consulting the history of the minutes, they found six other alleged victims. All describe, in court, hallucinating scenes where the policeman took all the risks to arrest them, often for a pretext, it seems, futile.
A truck driver said: “My load of potatoes was dusting. He blocked me on a roundabout, like a cowboy. “
At the bar of the court, the police officer invokes a lack of training: “I thought that I was in my rights by stopping the drivers. “
“He thought he was doing well”
An explanation that triggers a reaction from Me Sophie Papin, the lawyer for one of the victims: “No one is supposed to ignore the law. What is true for any litigant is even more true for a police officer. “
The police officer explains that in 2013, during a check, he was run over by a car that refused to stop. He had not been injured, but he would have suffered psychological consequences. The psychiatrist who assessed him noted “an alteration in his judgment at the time of the facts”.
Very upset against the actions of the police officer, the public prosecutor claims against him eight months suspended prison sentence and above all, the final ban on practice.
For his defense, the police officer chose Me Laurent-Franck Liénard.
The lawyer, usual defender of the police force and self-defense, had been for a time that of Alexandre Benalla, before throwing in the towel.
He was moved by the height of the prosecutor’s requisitions, arguing that his client had no intention of breaking the law: “He thought he was doing well for the protection of citizens. “
All the fined motorists paid the tickets issued by the police officer, except one, who contested the violation. One of them is demanding the reimbursement of his license, canceled because of the last points lost when it was fined.
The court will deliver its judgment on Monday March 22.
Jacques Joannopoulos
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